Incident Summary
At approximately 10:46am on Friday, March 20, 2015, a server error prevented GSU faculty and staff from accessing Microsoft's "Office 365" cloud-based services, including email, instant messenger (Lync), and SharePoint. These access issues persisted intermittently up until 9:46pm, when access was fully restored for all impacted customers. During this period, customers who remained logged in to Office 365 were not impacted.

Because we recognize that interruptions of service impact campus processes, we are communicating this post-outage analysis of what occurred and the measures being taken to address the factors resulting in this incident.

Incident Cause
The primary Active Directory Federation Services server that governs faculty and staff authentication to Microsoft Office 365 experienced an error during an automated token-signing certificate update process. This error resulted in certificates at GSU and Microsoft being out of sync, which caused the subsequent disruption of access. Microsoft support engineers are engaged and are actively investigating the root cause of the error.

Incident Response Measures
Information Systems & Technology is implementing improved monitoring of ADFS, developing a better understanding of Microsoft's automated certificate updating process, and establishing new procedures to ensure faster, more accurate customer communications in the event of future incidents.